“In all the years I have spent writing and thinking about a woman’s right to choose, I have never set foot in an abortion clinic, because I have never needed to. In my mind, I had always pictured a clean and comfortable place…”

“This was no Westchester clinic. The place was dirty and dark and the women in the room outside were standing, as there were no chairs.”

“But the visceral reality of abortion–the grimy clinic, the sobbing and hapless young woman, the need for a metal detector in the place in which one undergoes the most solitary and personal of procedures–cannot be understood by such desensitized vocabulary. The truth of the matter is, even in our richest cities, in a country where abortion is technically legal and Constitutionally protected, abortion is still a dirty word.”